VCF
October 7, 2025
VCF 9 NFS Fails To Deploy
Table of Contents
The Issue?
Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 with NFS backed storage using VCF Installer for the management domain can fail, even though validation passes.
Background and Process
At a high level, when deploying VCF 9, regardless of architecture and storage you have to fill out the online form or use JSON. After this, parameters are validated, then you deploy the environment.
Once validation is done, the first host is picked to deploy vCenter on to; VMkernel ports, portgroups, datastores, and other bits and pieces are configured prior to deploying vCenter. I recently ran into a deployment issue with NFS specifically (note: I have deployed using vSAN and FC several times with no issues) where vCenter would not deploy without manual intervention.
Root Cause
After some investigation, via general log trawling and UI clicking, I found that on each host, whilst the NFS data store was mounted and created properly, the datastore could be browsed. There was still an issue with deploying vCenter. The issue doesn’t surface until VCF Installer attempts to write to the datastore, otherwise it looked fine.
The VMkernel port was configured for jumbo frames, which is as specified in the wizard / json.
However, the vSwitch was still configured with 1500 bytes for MTU, this was causing the issue. No matter how many times I retried the failed deployment it kept failing at the same point, around 99% of VM creation / deployment for vCenter.
The Solution
The quick fix was to update the vSwitch MTU to 9000 aswell, I did this while the deployment was running and the VM creation / deployment immediately completed successfuly.
Summary
The VCF 9 management domain build is fine for vSAN and FC from my testing, however, users may get stuck when deploying the domain using NFS backed storage and jumbo frames over the network.
